


there is no sweeter innocence (than our gentle sin)

by possibilist



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, idek what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 13:51:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3531656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilist/pseuds/possibilist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'What did you do? What you would’ve done: save my people.' At this point you could say this to everyone. Lexa was right: this is war, and you were a great leader. You saved your people. You did not save yourself.</p><p>or: clarke wanders in grief; polis is full of a slight understanding when she arrives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there is no sweeter innocence (than our gentle sin)

**Author's Note:**

> i don't even know i just want clarke to go to visit lexa this is so angsty but with a bizarrely not-terrible ending who would've guessed
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: suicidal thoughts.

**there is no sweeter innocence (than our gentle sin)**  
.  
 _we were born sick / but i love it / command me to be well / no masters or kings / when the ritual begins / in the madness & soil / of that sad earthly scene / only then i am human / only then i am clean_  
—hozier, ‘take me to church’

//

It takes you nine hours to walk back to Mt. Weather.

It takes you nine days to bury the dead with your own hands, one grave at a time.

//

You bury the children first so you don’t have to see their small skulls rot.

//

After you put the last body in the ground—and you think you should’ve gone faster, should’ve ignored the blisters bleeding on your palms or the peeling sunburns on your shoulders, the way your whole body ached with  _life_ —you take out the gun that you had used to kill Dante Wallis.

Dante, you think—you remember, from literature classes, the archival or the seven circles of hell.

He could’ve never imagined the rot of bodies on this earth, and how hell is all around you, all over your hands, degrading beneath your feet: you did not fall from the sky to save anyone.

//

It gets dark and you find the moon, expect it to be big and vivid and rise in front of the earth like the hope you grew up with.

But instead the moon is small and blindingly orange. You wander back into Mt. Weather and find some moonshine somewhere in the recesses of the food storage rooms.

You find the last of the chocolate, too, and you wander back outside and sit at the base of a lovely willow. Or, at least, you think that’s what they were called, from what you remember from earth skills.

You drink as much as you can, until your throat burns as much as your eyes and you can’t feel the tips of your fingers. The gun is hot and cold against your palms at once, and you hold it carefully and put it in your mouth.

It would be easy, so easy—like all of those people,  _all of those people_ —to die.

You think of Lexa, and your mother, and Finn, and Bellamy and Octavia and Raven and everyone you love and everyone who trusted you and everyone who loved you back and how your death wouldn’t save anyone.

You pull the gun from your throat with trembling wrists and taste the rotten sulfur of the powder; you remember from earth skills:  _the weeping willow_.

Your tears are hot and your chest heaves and it all seems fitting.

//

_What did you do?_

_What you would’ve done: save my people._

At this point you could say this to everyone.

Lexa was right: this is war, and you were a great leader.

You saved your people.

You did not save yourself.

//

After twenty days, you wonder why no one comes to look for you. You’re predictable and you aren’t far away.

Your mom, really, should send out search parties, you’re pretty sure. But:  _I don’t need you to protect me_.

You don’t; she never could.

//

You sleep with your gun as a pillow anyway. Sometimes you wish it would go off.

//

Once you’ve been there for three weeks, you put as much food as you can into a pack and lay flowers on all of the graves. You need to go to Polis, you know, for your people, for yourself—Lexa, you know, will somehow understand.

You need to know how many times she’s sat through the night with her own knife pressed against her throat, tasting the sick, sweet blood of all of the people she’s let die for her in the warm cave of her mouth.

//

_Imagine two girls: one rose from the earth and one fell from the sky. They pick flowers and have soft palms; when they kiss it tastes like summer and cinnamon. They’re young and beautiful and their parents love them for not growing too fast—for growing toward instead of up._

_Imagine two girls: they fit into each other’s bodies when they sleep, all of the little rattles of their spines and notches of their thin hips. They never have to paint around their eyes or have their shoulders heavy with lives and armor. There are no sashes or pins, nothing but daisy chains. Sometimes, when they’ve learned each other’s skin, they drink sweet mulled wine in the middle of winter and kiss in the snow. One draws the other, paints the sharpness of her jaw with think oils; the other likes music, her gentle fingers floating over piano keys like she can breathe them. They tug each other close and sometimes they fight over what to eat for lunch or who holds whom when it’s summer and they sneak out to sleep beneath the stars. They know the weaved weft lines of the horizons of each other’s palms, the horizons of tomorrows that aren’t soaked in blood._

_Imagine two girls: for them, in this world that does not exist, there is no need to imagine. No one is digging out the bullets and no one is burning kills into their skin._

//

You get to a small grounder village a day later and decide to stop for supplies and maybe a warm place to sleep. You’re worried at first, because you have no idea, really, where you stand with the grounders, but apparently Lexa has wider range and a startling amount of compassion, because when you get there and say that you are Clarke, leader of the Sky People—which makes your teeth ache—they welcome you kindly.

Maybe it’s not surprisingly, actually, that Lexa has made sure her people do not harm you: she never broke her alliance; you never broke yours.

She’s a brilliant leader, after all.

//

A boy who looks nothing like Finn smiles at you from across the campfire and when you follow him back to his tent no one says anything.

His skin is dark and beautiful and his arms are covered in tattoos. He kisses like he doesn’t realize you have irradiated a civilization, and he is very gentle.

For now, it’s as good as a loaded gun.

//

You leave before dawn.

Maybe it’s not good decorum for Leader of the Sky People, but you’ve failed at that before anyway.

//

You walk for another day and a half before you happen upon another grounder settlement, this time a town. There are buildings, which you’ve never actually seen before, at least not ones that are above ground. They’re mostly short and square, with thick, rough brown walls.

Their greeting is friendly and you sit in a sort of hungry wonder inside a large hall while they bring you dinner. There are many warriors that want to ask you questions—of battle, of war, of Heda.

Lexa could answer them better, but you have no words for the devastation of winning a war or for how soft her lips were, so you say, “Your commander is brilliant. You are lucky to have such a leader.”

They nod like they understand completely, but you know they don’t. One of the women with long brown hair and light eyes, a tattoo snaking up her bare arm, her face less angular than Lexa’s but beautiful in its own right, watches you intently. She has a room of her own in a nearby house.

She must know, you think, because she is rough and she scrapes her nails down your back and bites hard into your shoulder, makes you come around her fingers until you can’t breathe.

You cry silently and taste the tears in your mouth. She says nothing, only lies down next to you afterward and traces the scar just under your left eye once.

“How far away is Polis?” you ask eventually.

She smiles softly. “Three days’ walk, Clarke of the Sky People.”

You nod.

“She would be lucky,” she says, “to have you.”

It’s a knife against your throat and you leave in the middle of the night, just after she falls asleep.

//

The village you find next reminds you of Tondc.

The people there, when they find out who you are, tell you very proudly that this where Lexa is from, this humble place of wood and rusted metal. You wonder about her parents or any family she might have; you never asked her.

The grounders tell you that they are all dead; they died in battle just after she left to Polis to be trained as Commander.

She was seven years old when she lost her whole world, and you never asked.

//

That night, you wander around a little bit and there is a woman giving a boy about your age a tattoo on his arm. You look at your hand that hasn’t stopped burning since you pulled that lever, and you sit down in front of her when the boy is finished. You have a warrior translate for you, and usually it’s against the rules explicitly for anyone but grounders themselves to get tattoos—they are sacred; they signify life and death—but they believe you, because of Lexa, you are sure, to be good.

You know the exact number of the dead and the small tally marks that stretch three inches on the inside of your wrist hurt far less when they rip into your skin than it did to kill them all, but it’s something.

It’s something.

//

The last town you stop at is probably what someone would call a city, because it stretches across a lot of land and has much bigger buildings. Lexa had been here weeks ago, they tell you, serious and intimidating and beautiful.

The speak of her as they would a god, and you suppose, in some ways according to their belief in reincarnation, she kind of is.

What they don’t know is that, once upon a time, before this, you backed her into a table and made her cry and kissed her back when she drew you to her. What they don’t know is that of all the people you have ever loved, she has had the gentlest hands.

//

It rains for the entire six hours you walk that day. You haven’t really showered, now, in about a month, and a part of you is a little embarrassed, because you really need to, probably.

You also haven’t heard from your people, or even asked about them.

You are also, you presume, about to be able to see Lexa.

You have so many questions for her, questions she will never be able to answer but ones that she will allow you to ask nonetheless.

The wall around Polis is huge, and you see these shining lights from relatively far away. It’s drizzling and cool and a grey green glimmer—Lexa’s eyes, and you don’t wonder where she was forged.

//

The guards let you in without any fuss and a very, very large man meets you and says, “Clarke of the Sky People, Heda has agreed to see you.”

You swallow and your mouth feels dry because you are not the same girl from a month ago, you are not the same girl who fell from the sky when you were a child and in wonder of the ground and you are not the same girl who made an alliance and you are not the same girl Lexa wanted to kiss.

Maybe you are not really a girl at all.

//

Lexa lives in a palace here, and Polis, from the streets you walked along, is unlike anything you’ve ever seen: there are marketplaces, stores; it’s teeming with people dressed in all kinds of shimmering things.

You think this is all Lexa’s, and it makes your stomach churn even more.

When you walk inside the door, and then another door, and another, past many guards and people who might be servants, you finally see her.

She’s in a dress, red and regal, and you see that she has a tattoo that covers her left arm from wrist to shoulder, which is new. She’s beautiful, with a clean face and ornately braided hair and you hate her.

Or, really—you want to hate her.

You want, desperately, to blame her for what you did, for what you had to do. If she had fought with you, by your side, maybe you could’ve taken Mt. Weather without killing everyone inside.

Or, maybe: she would’ve pulled that lever for you.

//

Her eyes widen just slightly when she sees you before she squares her jaw and says, “Clarke.”

It’s hard and lovely, the way her tongue clicks over the letters, like she wants to taste it every time.

You clench your fists because you want to lash out, but she just takes one tender, small step toward you and you feel your shoulders sag.

“I don't forgive you,” you say.

She nods. “I do not forgive myself.”

You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding. For some reason, your gun is still in your jacket pocket—none of the guards had checked you for weapons—and you take it out and point it at Lexa.

She stares at you calmly.

“You made me kill them all,” you say, and you feel tears press at your eyes.

“I did not,” Lexa says, and it’s so, so soft.

Your hand shakes.

“You saved your people, Clarke. I have heard of your valor.”

“There are two bullets left,” you tell her.

She nods and doesn’t take a step toward you, doesn’t call for her guards. She just stands, beautiful and so young.

“I really want to do it,” you whisper, and your voice cracks.

“I know, Clarke.”

“I’ve killed so many people,” you say, and you taste salt.

Lexa takes a slow step toward you.

“I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“Okay,” Lexa says, and she walks until the muzzle of your shaking, hot-cold gun is pressed to her chest, just above her heart.

 _Would this be forgiveness?_ you want to ask her.

“I am glad you are alive,” she says, and it’s gentle and soft and true, “even if, right now, you are not.”

Your sob stings your chest and you put the gun in her hand.

Maybe your whole body weighs a little less.

//

There’s a feast tonight, apparently, in celebration of the end of a 97 year long war. Which you suppose makes sense—when Bellamy returned from Mt. Weather he wanted to drink with you, after all. It makes sense for people to want to celebrate life and survival.

Lexa says, “You are welcome to stay in my quarters, barring you have no more weapons on your person.” The unspoken  _for your sake_  is there, but you appreciate how it’s in her gaze rather than her words anyway. “You are welcome to attend the feast as well. As you probably know from your journey here, I have kept you and your people in high standing with mine.”

The idea of thousands of people around you, celebrating a betrayal that caused you to be forced to annihilate so many innocent lives, makes you sick.

Lexa can tell, so she nods. “I will arrange for a bath and clothing and a room for you, if you like.”

You swallow—there is nowhere else in the world you could go. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Clarke,” she says and then walks past you.

When you turn after a few seconds of resolutely trying not to, you catch a glimpse of her back while she’s rounding the corner: there are only kill scars—hundreds of small brandings—and you rush to a bucket in the corner of her expansive room and throw up.

//

You wonder if you could drown yourself in the bathtub. You try, once, but it’s halfhearted and when you lungs burn you splutter to the surface. There is dirt and blood all around you in the water.

Love is weakness: it is, it is.

//

You dress in soft clothes that you think are probably Lexa’s, because you’re around the same size. They’re probably pajamas, a deep blue. You sit stiffly in a chair in a very nice room down from Lexa’s. You have no idea what to do with yourself: there is nothing to really distract you, so you end up staring at the tally marks on the inside of your wrist until they blur into a large single slate.

No one can wipe it clean.

//

Once it’s dark and what you think is quite possibly the middle of the night—you don’t know how much time has passed, although you have consumed a fair amount of what you’re pretty sure is wine—you pad out of your room and to Lexa’s. There are a lot of guards but they don’t make any moves to stop you.

When you step inside, she’s lit up by moonlight through a huge window, just walking from a vanity to a big, grand bed. It’s strange to you, that she doesn’t seem out of place here, in all of this luxury. You would’ve expected her to be awkward and foreign not in her armor, not covered in chain metal and knives, her hand resting on the hilt of her sword. But she moves with the same well-trained, natural grace, precise and feminine.

She’s in pajamas too, although hers are shorts that don’t reach very far down her muscled thighs. There are tattoos running down one of her legs, too, and you only glance away from her body when she clears her throat a little.

She doesn’t look embarrassed or amused, just as calm as ever.

“Is there something not to your satisfaction?”

“I don’t want to sleep,” you say.

She nods and walks toward her bed, wriggles under the covers. She turns on her side and tucks her arms under her head, and it makes her look years younger.

You want to cry.

“Do you see them too?”

“Yes,” she says after a few moments. “Every night.”

You stand there while she takes a few deep breaths and closes her eyes.

“It will never stop,” she says, “but you must sleep anyway, so that you do not end up seeing more.”

You feel your chin tremble.

“You may stay here tonight, if you wish.” Her voice is breathy.

You wait a few seconds before walking over slowly to her bed and climbing in. It’s big enough that you don’t come near touching her, but she lets you stare at her anyway, never opening her eyes again.

“I hate you,” you say softly.

Her breathing doesn’t falter once.

//

You are so tired, if you have nightmares, you don’t remember them.

//

By the time you wake up, Lexa is just coming back from training of some kind, you guess, because she’s sweaty and in light combat gear, a bruise on her forehead, her hair in a simple braid. It’s only seven in the morning.

“What time did you get up?” you ask.

“Before dawn. Swordsmanship.”

You stand and start to walk out of her room, because she looks like she’s going to undress.

“Clarke,” she says.

“Yes?”

“There is breakfast in half an hour, if you would like to join me. Someone will bring you food if you decline.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” she says, then turns her back to you and strips off her shirt.

The scars are still there, new and raw and just barely healed.

//

She’s already seated when you walk into the room a servant directs you to. Lexa is in simple, dark clothes, sitting with various generals or other officials, you assume.

They look serious, but they’re talking quickly and what looks like a lively conversation. Once, Lexa even smiles.

These are her people, you realize. This is who raised her; this is where she grew up. These people watched her get freckles, watched her baby teeth fall out, watched her fall in love and want to destroy the universe when that got taken away.

They watched her wage peace instead.

You’re about to walk out when she sees you.

“Clarke,” she says.

Everyone turns toward you expectantly and you sigh. When you sit down, someone puts an ornate plate of food in front of you.

They switch from Trigedasleng to English immediately, introduce themselves.

You realize they are proud of Lexa, and you want to hate her even more.

But then she looks down and it’s almost  _shy_ , the way she glances at her hands for a moment, and you cannot.

//

She doesn’t try to talk to you, doesn’t try to interact with you at all. You wander around Polis—which is colorful and loud and so bright sometimes your head hurts. Death is still so heavy on your shoulders, and you do not want people to look at you like someone to be respected.

But they do, and when you sleep in Lexa’s bed every night, with your clothes on, not touching, everything hurts a little less.

//

She comes back very late one night, entirely drunk, and her movements are a little clumsy while she changes in a corner and then hops—literally  _hops_ —into bed.

She starts laughing, and you don’t know what it’s at but you know the sound is one of the most shocking and wonderful things you have heard.

It breaks something inside of you, and for the first time in six weeks, you touch her.

All you do is graze your fingers over her palm, but she looks at you with a glassy-eyed smile, stars from the open window—your home—reflected in the earth of her eyes.

She squeezes your hand and very quickly falls asleep.

//

You go swimming one day as it’s getting warmer in a river on the edge of the city. It’s quick moving and terrifying and you are still a horrible swimmer, and you get caught in a riptide of current and smash around on some rocks before you burst to the surface.

You’re bleeding from a lot of scrapes and gashes, and it doesn’t feel like a gun and it doesn’t feel like a knife and it doesn’t feel like forgiveness either.

//

She’s in the healer’s building when you stumble your way there, and—of  _course_.

She raises a brow when you’re led to a bed next to her.

“What’d you do?” you ask as someone starts cleaning out a big gash on your thigh.

“I fell off my horse,” she says. “She spooked.”

When the healer moves, you can see a huge scrape on Lexa’s left side, along with a spattering of scars and tattoos against her tanned skin. There’s a bruise forming and you’re sure she’s going to have trouble breathing later on from pain, but she seems as stoic as ever now.

“What happened to you?”

 _I wanted to drown_ , you think, but instead you say, “I still can’t swim very well.”

You think she hides a knowing, sad smile. “What is your saying—tomorrow has time enough?”

“There’s always time tomorrow,” you say.

She nods. “Yes, Clarke. That.”

//

You ask her for news that night.

“From what I hear, Camp Jaha has not been threatened. I would assume that means your people are recovering.”

You nod—your mother and your friends are safe, then. But, still: “They don’t need me.”

She sighs and turns toward you in bed. “They will always need you, Clarke.”

You glance down at your wrist, those tally marks. She hesitantly reaches out to take your hand, and you let her.

“They will always need someone to bear their grief. They will never stop.”

You want to squeeze her hand  _hard_ , break the thin, tender bones there.

“I am sorry it has to be you,” she says. “You are  _good_ , and I am very sorry.”

//

Three days later you slam her up against a wall and kiss her  _hard_.

She kisses you back for a moment, sinking into your rough hands, before she pushes you back, her chest heaving and her pupils blown.

“I want it to stop,” you say loudly through gritted teeth.

She bites her bottom lip like she wants to cry and Lexa is young and so  _old_ all at once.

“Make it stop,” you say, weak and you hate yourself for it, for everything. “Lexa,” you say, and your voice breaks as you sag and lean your head against her shoulder. “Please make it stop.”

She’s silent—you both know she cannot stop this—but she holds you while you cry.

//

The next night she turns over and tucks her body into yours. She’s thin and she whispers, like if she’s any louder the air around you will break, “I want it to stop too, Clarke.”

//

_Imagine two girls: they are bound by heady summers and winter snows, childhood and flowers. They are not bound by the blood on their hands._

//

“I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive you,” you whisper, very close to her face. It’s afternoon and you are sitting next to her on a rock on the edge of the river you once tried to swim in.

She gives you a tiny, assenting nod. “I do not deserve your forgiveness, nor will I ever ask for it.”

“You’re a fucking, annoying  _asshole_  sometimes,” comes out of your mouth, and it seems to surprise both of you a little bit.

She grins and stands and does a canon-ball into the water below, splashing you.

You splutter and she expertly wades in the current.

“Come on, Clarke,” she says, “I promise to make sure you don’t drown.”

//

_Don’t worry._

_You’re safe_.

//

She’s going over maps at her desk while you look at all of the books—philosophy, history, politics—in a bookshelf along one wall of her room when you ask, “What are the scars for?”

“Who,” she says softly a few moments later.

You turn toward her with furrowed brows.

“ _Who_  are the scars for,” she clarifies.

“Oh.”

“And in answer to your question: my people who were killed in Tondc. I got them when I arrived back from Mt. Weather.”

“Lexa,” you breathe, “all at once?”

She nods and stares at her hands. “They died in horror all at once; I healed in two weeks.”

“Will it ever stop?”

“No,” she says, then stands. “You got a tattoo.” She gestures toward your wrist. “The counting marks.”

You suck in a breath. “Yes.”

“Those you killed in Mt. Weather to save your people.”

“Yes.”

“To remember loss, to let myself mourn when I need.”

“Yes.”

“All of the marks I have chosen for my body are for the same purposes, Clarke.”

You glance at her bare arms—she’s in a tanktop because today is uncharacteristically hot and it’s just the two of you anyway—and you make out the quiet outlines of stars stretching across her skin.

“I choose to make visible the marks I bear from loss because I cannot forget them anyway.”

You sigh. “Why are you like this?”

She looks confused. “Like what?”

“ _Wise_.”

She smiles, just slightly. “My commander spirit has learned much through the years.”

She's entirely serious and you don’t really dismiss her belief system—she is brilliant, after all—but you end up laughing just slightly. “Sometimes I think you are full of so much bullshit.”

She looks confused at the literal translation of the word, and it just makes you laugh harder.

You launch yourself forward and wrap your arms around her in a hug, and she stumbles for a moment before hesitantly wrapping her arms around you.

“Bullshit,” you say into her collarbone, “means that you are full of nonsense, Lexa.”

She breathes out a little  _oh_ , and then says, “Can you teach me more of those words.”

You spend dinner in her quarters, laughing over wine, teaching her all of the swears you know. She practices them intently and they sound so careful on her tongue, and it’s a strangely wonderful thing to wake up to Lexa shouting  _fuck_ as she hops around in the bright sun the next morning because she stubbed her toe.

//

_Imagine two girls: the only scars they have are from skinning their knees when they run through the forest to outrun rain storms, laughing and kissing too much along the way to stop from getting soaked all the way to the bone._

//

You kiss her three days later in the middle of a little grove she’s teaching you archery in, and the sun is bright and there’s a slight breeze. The leaves are starting to change colors and you feel the scars through her shirt when you run your hands down her back, but she doesn’t stop you, only backs up once and checks your eyes.

“You cannot stop me from hurting for what I have done,” you whisper, “and I won’t forgive you. But there are pardons, you know?”

She nods once with a very small smile, and she kisses you again.

//

“I need to go back to Camp Jaha,” you say over dinner.

She nods. “I am headed that way myself, to visit Tondc, if you would like to borrow a horse and travel the distance with protection.”

She sounds hopeful, even though you know she doesn’t mean to. It’s a better idea anyway: “Yeah, thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Clarke.”

You feel a strange lightness settle in your stomach at the prospect of seeing everyone again. It makes you sick but later Lexa kisses you and whispers, “It’s not going to go away. You must allow yourself to see life anyway.”

You flop back against the pillow. “You’re really, just—you’re something else, Lexa.”

She looks  _very_ confused.

You laugh. “Come here, idiot,” you say, and she smiles a little and tucks herself into you. By now, you know the notches of her own body as well as your own.

//

You don’t talk very much while you ride out to Tondc and Camp Jaha. You’re greeted by huge celebrations at each village you stop at, though, mostly because of Lexa, but word travels that you’re here too.

It’s peacetime, you realize, and Lexa is slightly lighter. She shakes the hands of elders who want to thank her, plays swords with small children.

She is a brilliant leader—she is respected and smart and ruthless and just and terrifying and overwhelmingly kind—and she cares far more for her people, you included, you think, than she would ever care to admit.

//

The night before you’re scheduled to split up before arriving at Tondc and Camp Jaha, you lie on a bed of furs together and strip each other down—of clothes, of pretense.

She is strikingly gentle, careful, asking you time and again if you’re sure. You think part of this is because she doesn’t want to hurt herself—not again.

But you want her for reasons that aren’t driven by loss and grief and death.

You want her because she is alive, and so are you.

She’s beautiful when she comes beneath you, quiet and trembling and clutching at your back and kissing you hard.

When you come after her, her mouth and her fingers touching you with the elegant purpose she does  _everything_ with, you forget, for a brief, glorious, unbearable moment, about hate.

//

You get ready quietly the next morning. There’s a small mirror in the tent you have, and you glance at yourself in it. You look older, so much older, but at the same time, you look very young.

Your eyes are different, you decide—the blue of something entirely other than the sky.

“Lexa?”

She turns from where she buttoning her pants. “Yes, Clarke?”

“Will you cut my hair for me?”

Her eyes go wide for a moment. “I can—I am happy to arrange that, or—”

You smile a little and walk toward her. “It’s just gotten long,” you say. “Plus, I know you are both competent with a knife as well as your hands.”

She  _blushes_ , which might be the most hopeful thing you’ve seen in a long time.

“Okay,” she says, then tells you to sit down and finds a pair of scissors. She sounds nervous, and it’s adorable.

“Lexa,” you say, “breathe.”

“I’m fine,” she says.

You laugh a little bit and turn around to face her. “Just cut it to my shoulders, okay?”

She nods very seriously and then runs her hands through your hair. You hear a snip and then she stills and asks, “Was that all right?”

“I don’t know,” you say, and you’re trying not to laugh, “was it?”

“I believe so,” she says, and then she starts again. She’s hesitant the whole time but she doesn’t pause between every time, at least, and you sit patiently. You want to feel different all the time, you wish the tally marks weren’t on your wrist and you wish your father wasn’t dead and you wish that you hadn’t killed children and you wish that you’d never had to dig their graves.

But here you are, and this is now, and you bear the grief of hundreds of people, but when Lexa nervously tells you she’s done and you stand, run a hand through your hair and then look in the mirror, you see yourself, not skeletons and ghosts in your wake.

“Is it—suitable?”

When you turn around her eyes are big and you say, “Yes, Lexa, it’s suitable.”

She relaxes and kisses you softly. “You are very pretty,” she tells you, and it makes you ache, because you are both so young.

Her face is fully flushed and you shake your head a little. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

She bites her bottom lip and then smiles.

//

“Are you ready to go home?” she asks, when you’re at the point where you’re going to split off. You’d both gotten down from your horses and are standing in a little clearing a bit off from the trail.

“I don’t know where I think of as home anymore,” you say. “But I think I’m ready to see them—for  _them_ , you know. Life. Maybe death too but not just death.”

She smiles a little. “You are a great leader, Clarke kom Skaikru.”

“Lexa,” you say, “ _thank you_.”

She shakes her head. “In a month, I will go to some cities by the sea. It may be beneficial for both of our people if you accompany me.”

“I can do that.”

She nods, then leans forward to kiss you. She’s so gentle you want to cry, and you press her closer for a few moments before you pull back and silently, without any mention, wipe her years.

“Love is not weakness,” she says. “Nor is it strength. It is love.”

“So much bullshit,” you say, but you both know you don’t mean it at all: she’s right.

“May we meet again,” she tells you formally and turns toward her people.

“I’ll miss you too, Lexa,” you say, and she faces you with a smile and a wave before striding off purposefully through the tall grass until you can’t see her anymore.

//

You allow the hugs of your mother and your friends to not remind you of graves.

**Author's Note:**

> come chill (or rant abt sexism, either one) at possibilistfanfiction.tumblr.com if you want


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